To create a work of art that perfectly co exists and makes sense in a space as large as that of the Grand Palais (13,500 square meters) with ceilings in wrought iron and glass that rise up to 45 meters in height, isn’t an easy task.

After the great success with Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan, attracting 280.000 visitors in barely one and a half months, French artistDaniel Buren (1938, famous for his vertical stripes of a width of 8.7 cm), opens the fifth edition of Monumenta.

From the 10th of May to the 21st of June Buren invites us to experience games of light and colour, and beckons us to reflect while strolling through the unique space he has created, and that he has named Excentrique(s) - a sort of dense forest constituted by numerous metallic circles of different sizes all tangent, stretched out on blue, yellow orange or green plastic transparent canvases, and mounted on thin black and white pillars in the great nave of the Grand Palais.

The work progressively captures the skylight coming from the immensely high dome. When it is grey and rainy the floor, the visitors, and the whole environment turns into pastel colours. A ray of sunshine suffices to transform the colours into bright and vivid tones. In the centre of the space, in a clearing of 900 metres, fifteen mirrors installed on the ground, capture the light and reflect the outline of the sky and fragments of the coloured circles. People can walk on them or around them, before moving on to discover a restaurant with semicircular furniture the artist himself designed, and a library featuring catalogues and art books.

As you walk around to further explore Excentrique(s), the names of the four colours, are whispered by different voices in 37 languages (– in Berber, Swahili, Serbian...)– The sound is continuously distributed through speakers that capture the visitors attention.

At night, the work will be quite different. Powerful searchlights sweep the space giving the spectator a completely different perception.

When Daniel Buren was asked two years ago to create a temporary work of art for Monumenta, he demanded that the main entrance of the building be moved to a lateral exit outside the Grand Palais, close to the Champs Elysées tube station. This way you enter the exhibition through a dimly lit corridor leading to the nave, and as you approach your destination you are gradually greeted by the almost blinding colours and light.

Buren at first found the building intimidating "It is objectively very special because it is one of the worlds largest exhibition spaces given to an artist". Buren explains that he used the circle, (often present in his work), as he realized that everything except the neoclassical facade of the Grand Palais, was built on the form of a circle, almost as if the architect had designed the building with a compass.

"Everything is round: the rotunda, the stairs... When architect Patrick Bouchain (associated with the project for Monumenta) discovered an Arabic drawing of the tenth century which corresponded to a mathematical formula on the geometry of filling the largest area with five tangent circles of various diameters, I knew that I would use the circle as a visual tool. The 377 circles are of 5 different diameters (7 to 32 meters) are spread over an area of over 6000 metres" says Buren.

When asked why he chose to name his work Excentrique(s) he answers: "One can think of an explosion of circles, eccentricities ... But I refuse to explain. I leave the viewer free to find his own interpretation".